Monthly Archives: January 2012

I wish I was the Anthony Bourdain of technology. William Gibson came close with No Maps for These Territories but it lacked the right vibe. I think it was because of Bono. Anyway, a tech tourist show with a post modern host is something I would love to do when I retire. Drink beer with project managers, wear dark sunglasses, smoke their clove cigarettes and just jam out with the platform. Who cares if it crashes? Shitty local bands provide the backdrop in the smoke filled bars as we just brainstorm cool stuff over the local deep fried dish.

We’re at the cusp of a new revolution, we’re at the cusp of the old revolution. Sun Microsystems said 10 years ago “the network is the computer”. We saw the tadpole notebook die. “Who would run UNIX on a laptop?”

Who would run Linux on a cellphone?

Solaris and Linux are old news, crushed under the terribly irony of their own success and android is really the dragon risen. Solaris did oracle so well that oracle bought it and made it from a wonderful garden into a toaster. Linux continues on as a desktop, or a server, but Nokia championing a full Linux on a phone never materialized with any success. Google came in the night and hammered it into a legitimate mobile platform by throwing out the trappings of the OS while keeping the enterprise level Java ideas (something lost on Apple) and what do we have now?

We have a mobile app delivery platform. Mark my words, this is huge. It’s so big Ubuntu has been pretending it was their idea and completely missed the boat. Protip guys – your desktop browser doesn’t belong on a tablet. But who’s to say thats not going to change into a mobile browser through theming? Who knows what goes on in their heads at all?

The new internet isn’t going to be made from webpages, it’s going to be made from applications. There’s two particular forces here which caused this: HTML is junk and the OS always got in the way. Cellphones, today, aren’t that different from enthusiast computers of yesteryear. They play games, they capture video, they play music, they take pictures and they do it wirelessly. Think about that for a moment. To make a computer do this, you need a webcam, you need a graphics card, you need fast storage and you need sound. The computers biggest problem was that it didn’t come with these things. Windows always insisted it needed updates, driver disks, etc. The problem was always the OS. Apple ended up going way over the mark and also branded the heck out of an OS. People line up around the block for it, it’s completely bizarre to me. Apple too misses the mark, applications you purchase on your device don’t work on your computer. In a lot of ways apple did these things, but I also think they priced themselves back into the enthusiast market. There’s no reason to use them when only a small minority of people have these features. We were missing the important part of the puzzle – Cheap, Complex Devices.

You get cellphones which do these things for free. Sign a two year contract, pick the carrying case color of your choice and out the door you go. It plays video. It captures video. It’s a camera. Its an audio recorder, a music player, and it surfs the web, all wirelessly.

Why doesn’t it do this on the web? HTML.

HTML has made awesome strides over the years for client side execution, the problem is that the clients have made great strides over the years not to be the executors. Phones are still ARM9, 1ghz (if you’re lucky) devices with processors the size of your thumbnail. While things like terga have gone a long way towards specific work units (nVidia’s GPU, etc), there’s no hardware accelerator for HTML. It just doesn’t exist. Dalvik, of course, is hardware accelerated. See what google did there? Instead of using a presentation language for applications and trying to accelerate that, full well knowing MS was going to stomp them to death with IE, they accelerated the language you can write your presentation layer in. Suddenly, the camera, the audio, the recorder, and the phone don’t require a stack of driver disks. They have very elegantly end-run the presentation problem by making the OS go away. They catered to the idea that no-one cares what their phone runs. A phone is a phone the same way a TV is a TV or a car is a car, except when your TV can play on your phone because of the netflix app and your car gets it’s maps from google via bluetooth. People don’t care, per se. It’s a phone. Netflix is a neat trick. Netflix keeps your eyes on the phone. How many ads does Netflix run? Zero, you pay for it. How many ads does the CNN app run? A lot. You pay for the service with ads like TV, but instead of channels now you have apps.

This is uninspired, insipid horseshit. It doesn’t change how we do things, it merely reassigns TV channels to applications. Instead of tuning to the channel, you click a button. All that’s done is make the phone into the remote control and the TV, or you could think of it as a TV without a remote control. It’s boring. It’s the thing legislation is made of to “protect the rights of consumers” because the MPAA and the RIAA don’t get it, they don’t come up with new ideas.

Here’s an idea, take the device and do something with it. Make an Autozone app which lets you pay for a mechanic to connect to your phones camera so you can show him where you’re stuck on the project. They can sell you special phone soap when you’re done because you didn’t wash your filthy hands before touching the display. Make a social network app which lets you define public content you will share with people in an area, then walk around the building with your GPS on to define an area people will exchange info with you. Enjoy the particular vibe of a movie or song? Why not a music player which correlates where people hang out to enjoy the music? People who list their activities as “sports” and listen to upbeat jazz while running a route may have a route which attracts amateur athletes who don’t enjoy complex terrain but want to run for fitness outside.

What we have driving this is association. When we coalesce these different technologies into a single platform, we need to realize that they stop being technologies unto themselves and they can be used in a complimentary fashion. At very least I am surprised that banks haven’t set up internet tellers. Not only do people enjoy talking to tellers, etc face to face but in terms of verifying the security of the account, seeing the customer (and having a picture of them) is worth the security alone. The customer feels like the bank takes a personal stake in them, the queue can be managed by the application instead of standing in line at the bank and the bank has strong identity verification. Phones can scan barcodes too, have them hold their drivers license up to the camera to be scanned for another layer of security just in case they’re some sort of Max Headroom puppet.

The internet presentation is dead, its bones pave the way for the new internet presentation. The future always feels like it’s right around the corner.

In continuing the experiments with fermenting weird stuff, the newest experiment is 1 gallon of welches grape juice and 1 lbs of dark brown sugar.

Why?

It tastes like port wine.

But that’s not the point, and it’s not what the post is about. The experiments are driven by two factors: No-one really seems to be exploring fermenting non-beery things with beer yeast and the experiments have to be cheap enough that if the product is total junk, I can toss it. The biggest hurdle here is yeast. Good yeast, which is usually $7 a phial, is way to expensive to be tossing on top of apple juice and brown sugar, grape juice and brown sugar, motor oil and other things you might want to experiment with fermenting and drinking.

As usual, we’re using a standard 6.5 stopper, three piece airlock, carlos rossie 4 quart jugs, WLP530 and whatever I feel like feeding the WLP530. Why 530? It’s got a nice flavor profile (it worked really well for the cider) and it seems fairly tolerant of.. me feeding it terrible stuff. The downside – it operates really slowly. Really slowly. Even on it’s own fermenting good old maltose it’s just slow. The cider took a month, and I wasn’t sure if the cider was going to work. In typical fashion it took three days to get started and it will probably take it a month to finish.

The yeast wash was fairly easy and I think I overthought the problem the last time. Take the yeast trub (the slurry on the bottom of the bottle) preferably by pouring your product off from it as gently as possible into a bottle or another jug, then fill the original jug up with water and shake it. The yeast is now suspended in the water. Put some foil or wrap on top and put it in the fridge for a week or until the yeast settles back down. (Note that if you brewed an all grain batch, you’ll see two layers. The bottom layer is proteins from the grains and you don’t want this). Do this until the water runs clear, usually twice or three times.

Once you have it down this far, you want to pour off the water one last time and then stir up the slurry. Pour this into a glass or (ideally) the tube the original yeast was shipped in. Top up with water (or it will mold), seal, save $7.

That being said, to get the yeast to start you either need a stir plate (but this is a post for another time) or you need a bubbler stone. The stir plate is the better option in my opinion because the yeast is going to clump up and sit on the bottom. That’s why you need the bubbler, you need to put air in the product. Lacking either one of these, I just put a cap on the carlos rossi bottle and shook the hell out of it once I had put the yeast in. This worked, but like I said, it’s a slow starting yeast which is made even slower because of the lack of oxygen in the wort.

So hows it coming along? Three days into it, it’s finally to the place I would expect actual wort to be bubbling after 12 hours (a bubble every second or so). I’m thinking the grape juice either has chemical preservatives in it or its way too acidic for this yeast. ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. If it plays out the way the cider did, it should finish sweet and have enough complexity to satisfy jaded drinkers while being easy (and cheap) enough to make to keep as a table wine.